In the Spring 2001 issue of The Psychotherapist, our UKCP Research Committee colleague David Winter put a compelling case for therapists to meet the challenge of evidence-based practice and become involved in empirical validation of their work. In echoing his call we would like to suggest that psychotherapy research, far from being the dehumanizing and difficult toil that has sometimes been suggested, can help clinicians to humanize their practice by collecting and responding to evidence.

Previous articles in this series have argued the case for the merits of one or other of the different research approaches available to us, as if, for example, by undertaking quantitative analyses with samples of many patients we would automatically prevent ourselves from using the insights that can be obtained from qualitative analysis such as emerges in the single case history. In this article, we hope to make the case for a pluralistic approach to research that would increase understanding along several fronts simultaneously.

Graduate School of Business / Stanford, CA http://www.gsb.stanford.edu/

WHAT THE SCHOOL SAYS:

Stanford Graduate School of Business (GSB) believes that organizational leadership is a noble and critical pursuit. MBA students are prepared to tackle social and environmental issues as corporate managers, nonprofit leaders, government officials, board members, and volunteers.

A QUICK LOOK

NOTE: All information is self-reported data submitted to the Center for Business Education

The undulating tune of a silky tango song fills the Baby Cues Baby Moves class, where four-month-old Lily and her mother, Helena, are dancing. Lily, attentive and alert, is lying on her back on the floor in front of Helena, who is also sitting on the floor with her legs folded underneath her. Lily's head is turned to her right side as she grasps her mother's fingers and they engage in a lovely arm dance pas-de-deux. Their arms glide and circle smoothly and slowly and then rhythmically with acceleration across Lily's body, out, up and around. At times Lily's whole body joins in the dance as she purses her lips in synchrony with Helena's “pushhh, pushhh…pushhh” melodic singing while Lily simultaneously gazes up and out, extending her head and lengthening through her torso, followed by kicking her left and then right leg up and down. Helena delightfully exclaims, “I'm just following what Lily wants to do, whether she wants to move slow or fast…it's like contact improve [dance] with babies”. As their dance continues, Lily keeps her head to her right, actively gazing at her dancing peers and intermittently at Helena from the corner of her eye. But when the music comes to an end with a strong crescendo there is no question where Lily's attention is—in perfect synchrony, Lily tilts her head up and over to her mother, opening her pursed lips and setting her gaze on Helena, as Helena simultaneously shifts her head to capture Lily's gaze. In this moment their loving connection is palpable.

It is well known that for centuries, often intense patterns of exchange—of goods, ideas, architectural forms, beliefs—have developed in and across the Sahara. People and goods have moved through trade, but also through the dynamics of conquest, pilgrimage, and religious education. Like the Mediterranean world, the Sahara has experienced cycles of flourishing and reduced prosperity as these forces have ebbed and flowed across the longue durée and into the present. The end of the centuries-long caravan trade in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries marginalized or ruined the oasis cities whose lifeblood it had been; the recrudescence of movement and exchange within and across the desert today is having other effects on the populations that have for centuries inhabited these spaces. The inhabitants of the valley of the Mzab, situated in a rocky plateau whose altitude varies between 300 and 800 meters above sea level, 600 kilometers south of Algiers at the edge of the northern Sahara, have always depended on commercial activity for their survival. Ever since their arrival in the eleventh century CE, the Berber-speaking Zenata Muslims of the Ibadi rite who settled in the arid valley and built their cities here have been engaged in commerce.1 Successfully adapting to changing economic circumstances over many centuries, the Ibadis of the Mzab were considered by the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu (1958) as classic exemplars of the combination of “puritanism” and capital: commercial and financial entrepreneurs adhering strictly to a particularly rigorous form of Islamic doctrine.2 For the people of the Mzab, a community whose social and political life was determined by their particular interpretation of Islam, Ibadism was a determining factor in relations with other social groups. It has therefore played a major role in the history of their exchanges with other populations, mandating a certain distinctiveness relative to other Muslim groups, requiring particular social and educational practices for the survival of the community, but also regulating the integration into the community of other ethnic groups, particularly those emerging from slavery within the Mzab itself.

For many years now, the tide of opinion has been against placing children and young people in residential care, and there has been a commensurate burgeoning of fostering and adoption services. This opinion has been rooted in the feeling that children need to be in families, a well-founded desire to give children homes, and a prejudice against institutional care, reinforced by a constant flow of scandals in children’s homes. In this chapter I outline why I feel there will always be a need for residential provision for certain children. I then look at some of the issues that besiege children’s homes and make the work so demanding and difficult. Finally, I also reflect on what is needed in children’s homes if they are to provide a containing and therapeutic environment for children to live in.

There is a large number of children and young people who, when things go wrong at home, are placed almost as a matter of course in foster care. Very often these children are not suited to family life, and there is a tragic mismatch between foster carers who want to provide children with a substitute home and the children whose level of disturbance means they place an impossible burden on any family where they go to live. There are, of course, exceptional foster carers who seem to be able to tolerate very high levels of destruction, sexualized behaviour, and violence in their homes. However, for most foster carers, the daily impact of living in close proximity to such distress, which so often manifests itself in attacks on the foster home and indeed on the foster carers, causes immense emotional strain and can lead to burnout and breakdown.

This introduction to the ways in which documentary engages with the world as we know it takes up the series of questions indicated by the chapter titles. These questions are the commonsense sort of questions we might ask ourselves if we want to understand documentary film. Each question takes us a bit further into the domain of documentary; each question helps us understand how a documentary tradition arose and evolved and what it has to offer us today.

The current Golden Age of documentaries began in the 1980s. It continues unabated. An abundance of films has breathed new life into an old form and prompted serious thought about how to define this type of filmmaking. These films challenge assumptions and alter perceptions. They see the world anew and do so in inventive ways. Often structured as stories, they are stories with a difference: they speak about the world we all share and do so with clarity and engagement. Anyone who has come of age since the 1980s doesn't need to be convinced of this, but older generations may have to adjust their assumptions about the power of nonfiction relative to fiction. In a time when the major media recycle the same stories on the same subjects over and over, when they risk little in formal innovation, when they remain beholden to powerful sponsors with their own political agendas and restrictive demands, it is the independent documentary film that has brought a fresh eye to the events of the world and told stories, with verve and imagination, that broaden limited horizons and awaken new possibilities.

She had been living in Paris. One day, out of the blue her analyst of some time, an eminent academic, died. She was shaken and profoundly saddened but on her return to live permanently in England, she made her mind up. She would seek new conversations.

She decided to have analysis with me and her choice was a surprise. Her previous analyst came from such a different background both intellectually and analytically. I found myself intrigued, possibly flattered, yet amazed to be an attractive or likely alternative for this woman.

Soon she started making the journey, twice a week, continuing for several momentous years, and with one momentous interruption.

I doubt my mind was really open at that point. Imagining what she is likely to bring to sessions, I muddy the waters of desire.

My likely failing was to underestimate the leap, largely unconscious, this woman was making in her analytical choice, as if an unrealised necessity, not yet formulated, for a radical difference, was pushing her to meet the unfamiliar she had been finding attractive for a while. Or so it gradually transpired.

The bourée is rhythmically the least complex of all the French Baroque dances. Its character was described by eighteenth-century theorists as gay (gaie) or joyful (lustig), and it is played “lightly” (fort légèrement), or perhaps “lightheartedly.”1 Johann Mattheson describes its gentle nature: “its essential characteristic is contentment, pleasantness, unconcern, relaxed, easy going, comfortable, and yet pleasing.”2 Bourées do not expose the depths of a composer’s soul, but they do express a genuine, aristocratic joie de vivre.

The music to La Bourée d’Achille (Fig. III-1), a popular duet at court balls of the early eighteenth century, shows many of the bourée’s characteristics at that time. The metric hierarchy (II–2–2) is duple on all levels, the beat is the half note, and harmonic change is primarily on the beat and pulse levels. Most bourées have a time signature of either 2 or , with two half note beats to the measure. A few use the time signature , in which case the beat is the quarter note.

“The idea of trauma involves a consideration of external factors; in other words it belongs to dependence. Trauma is a failure relative to dependence”

(Winnicott, 1989, p. 145)

The life stories of difficult patients are interlaced with traumatic infantile experiences that cannot be disregarded in our analytic work because the traumatic event constantly resurfaces, not only in their anxieties and in the transference, but also in their dreams. This is why the analyst must keep the emotionally disturbing environment in mind so that he can prepare an appropriate emotional setting for each specific story. The direct effects of the traumatic experience and, above all, its indirect effects—in other words, the aggregate of individual responses in the form of psychopathological structures that were triggered by the trauma—determine the clinical problem.

In “Analysis terminable and interminable” (1937c) Freud states that analysis, even if successfully concluded, cannot prevent eventual relapses from recurring and that an interminable analysis would be required to satisfactorily tackle all the situations a patient will experience throughout his life.

To make full use of the Philippines in their drive on the Japanese home islands, US forces needed to capture the northernmost island of Luzon; to make full use of Luzon, US forces needed to capture Manila. However, the attention given to Manila itself was minimal during US planning for the Luzon campaign. A mixture of hope, denial, and faulty intelligence reports led General Douglas MacArthur to believe the Japanese would not fight for the Philippine capital city, but rather would declare it an open city, as he had done three years earlier. That was not to be, contrary to even the wishes of the top Japanese commander on Luzon, General Tomoyuki Yamashita.

After US forces landed in Lingayen Gulf on northern Luzon on 9 January, it took them almost a month to move south across the Central Plain to Manila. Waiting there was a mixed Japanese army-navy force, thrown together by local Japanese commanders from the manpower scraps available. It took another month of hard fighting for two reinforced US divisions to clear the city. The end result was significant losses for the US forces, the elimination of the Japanese force, large-scale civilian casualties, and heavy damage to the city.

Thank you for volunteering to participate in this research. You are encouraged to write as much as you would like in order to express or reflect on your thinking about the questions asked. Please feel free to use the back of the sheets if necessary. Your contributions are well appreciated.

12b. Any comments on the above activity?

13. What anxieties would you have when you are about to meet a client of a different skin colour to yourself?

14. Please read this vignette carefully and then answer the following questions:

A 25 year old counsellor walked into the waiting room and called out:

“James!“

A big, tall bald-headed man stood up dwarfing the counsellor.

He looked about 55 years of age. The counsellor smiled at him.

“My name is Bobby, please come with me,“ she said.

They walked a few doors down the corridor to a consulting room. Bobby indicated a chair for James to sit but he remained standing arms folded across his chest exposing the skull and crossed bones tattoo on his left arm. The left knuckles were tattooed HATE while the right knuckles had matching LOVE tattoo across them, and a serpent tattoo resting along the right arm.

One of Luther’s most portentous debates was his controversy with Pope Leo X. After the Ninety-five Theses and subsequent articles had been condemned by the pope in Exurge Domine, Luther wrote an apology in the form of forty-one theses with extended explanations in the pamphlet called Assertio (1520). It was published only a few weeks before Luther was finally excluded from the Roman Catholic Church on January 3, 1521. It is written by a man who is already more outside than inside the community of the holy and the orthodox. Thus almost excommunicated he communicates back in, to those who represent the authority of the tradition and the cornerstone of the church.

This polemical situation forced Luther to elaborate on his theory of scripture, with emphasis on its theological authority. I venture a double reading of Luther, as a non-dogmatic repetition of his text: On the one hand, I discuss Luther’s approach to scripture, and thus introduce some theological theories of hermeneutics (such as by Ebeling, Jüngel, Beisser), which argue that we should continue reading and interpreting the biblical texts by following Luther’s procedure for the interpretation of scripture: sola scriptura. On the other hand, I question three of the basic premises of their hermeneutical theory: the univocal authority of the text (the single reading), their emphasis on the true sense of the text (and consequently the rejection of non-sense), and the dialectical exclusion of hiddenness, including the most problematic topos of the text. All three methodological presuppositions correspond to the philosophical hermeneutics of Gadamer, and may thus be considered ontological presuppositions within the hermeneutical paradigm of dialectical understanding. Rather than presenting an alternative theory here, I will discuss alternative readings of Luther, since I think that there are certain traits of his theology that resist the kind of hermeneutic synthesis that has dominated the (traditional as well as liberal) polemics on Luther, and on Protestant theology, in the twentieth century. Hence, I focus on a few simple strategies of his textual theory and analyze them as examples of scripture with lower-case letters, that is, according to a more generic theory of scripture as writing. This is explicitly an invitation to further controversy on the issue.

This chapter discusses the treatment of Islam in the Brazilian TV series O Clone. It examines how the series positioned its main character, Jade, to provoke national dialogues around the meanings of Muslim religiosity, Arab ethnicity, and associated gender, social, and political issues in the Brazilian public sphere. While the idea for the series was conceived before the attack on the World Trade Center, the controversy that emerged around the show’s treatment of the Muslim religion speaks to the heightened public interest in these questions after September 11, 2001. The chapter addresses the public’s reaction to the series, as well as the reactions of members of the various Muslim communities in Rio de Janeiro. It also addresses stereotypes presented by the series, and the reactions of both Arab and non-Arab Muslim communities to these stereotypes. A key issue that emerged was the distinction between “religion” and “culture” and between Arab-Brazilians as an assimilated “race” and Muslim Brazilians, particularly recent converts who reject the sensuality identified with assimilated Arab-Brazilians. This chapter ultimately suggests that the telenovela series created a universe where different elements were mixed together that were faithful neither to the “reality” of the Muslim religion nor to the customs of the Arab country that they supposedly presented.

I awoke with a start and lay rigid in my bed. The gentle hum of the air conditioning unit drowned the sounds of the night outside. The clock on the telephone beside the bed stated that it was 3.38 a.m. It was nearly time. I felt a wave of panic rise up within me and fought to control the shaking, heart pounding, gut-wrenching feeling of despair which threatened to overwhelm me. “Calm down, get a grip,” I said to myself. “You have to get through this. Falling apart now won't do any good at all.”

As I lay there, sweating and afraid, I heard footsteps and a gentle knock on the door.

“Thanks Bob, I'm awake,” I said.

I listened, straining for the sound of an approaching car. Nothing. Pulling on yesterday's shorts and sweatshirt that lay in a heap by the bed, I stumbled into the bathroom, splashed water across my face and drank huge gulps from the tap. Turning on the light I caught a glimpse of myself in the bathroom mirror. Haggard and hollow-eyed, with a nervous rash on my chin—not a pretty sight. I felt a wave of nausea rush over me. I swallowed hard and closed my eyes against it.

In 2015, a top Ecuadorian official told me, “We’d rather accept loans from Beijing than Washington. After all, China has never overthrown or killed our leaders — unlike the US.”

When I pointed out that China had a history of invasions in Asia, he replied, “Yes. They’ve seen those places as part of their ancient kingdom. But they haven’t done it in Latin America, or Africa, or the Middle East. The US has.”

We were discussing the debt audit commission that had reviewed the legitimacy of the loans taken on by Ecuador’s CIA-supported dictators during my EHM days. The commission’s findings had convinced President Correa to default on loans worth more than $3 billion. In retaliation for the president’s initial refusal to pay $30.6 million that was due on $519 million of outstanding global bonds in 2012, Standard and Poor’s Rating Services and Fitch Ratings slashed Ecuador’s credit rating.1

Correa turned to Beijing. China offered Ecuador a $1 billion loan, which soon was increased to $2 billion.2 As his government repaid that loan, Correa reestablished Ecuador’s global credit standing, but he also made his country beholden to China and its version of EHMs. By April 2015, Ecuador’s debts to China had risen to almost $5.4 billion — representing 28 percent of its external debt.3